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Thursday, May 30, 2013

A Gorgeous Chinoiserie Powder Room

Having grown up in Lake Forest, Illinois, its great homes are still to me the most beautiful anywhere. The stage for the 15th biennial Lake Forest Showhouse was an Italian Renaissance 15,000 square foot estate designed in 1916 by famed architect David Adler.

Interior designer Shelley Johnstone Paschke designed the lounge and powder room. The lounge walls are lacquered in Farrow and Ball Saxon Green and are trimmed in gold. The ceiling is painted in faux malachite. Note the ivory silk curtains trimmed in Samuel and Sons Greek key, the Oscar de la Renta Zeus chair with tiger silk velvet, the sisal carpet, rustic baskets, lucite console, and antique Chinese export jars.

In the powder room area, she has papered the walls in Farrow & Ball Acanthus. I love the lucite stand with the blue and white Chinese jar and the starburst chandelier. All in all, a wonderful mix of many of my favorite elements.

2 comments:

Of all the rooms at this year's showhouse, these small rooms seem to best capture Adler's elegant style, and, cleverest of all, do so with out any overt copying of Adler's own designs. Then again, part of the spaces' appeal--for me, anyway--is their color. I used the same F&B color on my book room walls at home because it seemed to me to be the 1930s in a can.